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About THINKING as the art of desire, and ART as the desire of THINKING FRESH 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018…

Karen Carson RIGID FORMS PULSANT COLORS

What’s sensibility? It is that which exists beyond our beings and yet constantly belongs to us. … Imagination is the sensibility vehicle … We will make fun of our conventional psychological world, to make ourselves free from it.

Yves Klein 1959

THE SECRET DOVE

Karen Carson’s most recent bas relief paintings, Los Angeles

By Rosanna Albertini

Rou-cou spoke the dove,

Like the sooth lord of sorrow,

Of sooth love and sorrow,

Rou-cou spoke the black to the wooden body that bursts open in the center of the painting with a song of yellow and pink.

“ I am more interested in the glamorous visual product that comes out of pain as opposed to the painful, dark, victimized images.” KC

It’s a fact: the splendor of two wings not completely symmetrical overcomes the terror of a body not allowed to move; colors marry the wooden limbs brushing against them like memories of a sunny day. Colors ask angles and lines to preserve a feeling of joy as humans cannot, and box it in so perfectly that time wouldn’t steal it, its hands were lost.

And a hail-bow, hail-bow,

To this morrow.

Three windows smile and cry. The architectural forms are rudimentary and irregular like each cell of our body making faces at every change of food, temperature, or the daylight sinking into the night. A house for the heart,hidden behind curtains of paper thoughts. A house for closed eyes, pulsing in our veins.

She lay upon the roof,

A little wet of wing and woe,

And she rou-ed there,

Softly she piped among the suns

And their ordinary glare,

The forms get sharper and pointed. The rectangular edges of the painting are elbowed aside, and the twin triangles try to grow out of it like skeletons in search of their body. As might be expected, they already are in the artist’s body, but they slip out through the tip of her fingers, and the hair of her brush. “Rou-cou” whispers the center, “Leave me quiet, it’s hard for me to separate one day from the other, not to mention the colors of my feelings. I get darker and darker despite the suns of the flowers, and the sunset pink. Let me withdraw, and disappear.”

The sun of five, the sun of six,

Their ordinariness,

And the ordinariness of seven,

Which she accepted,

Like a fixed heaven,

Also in the life of painted forms there is a moment of acceptance. Not resignation, or giving up with standing proudly through the waves of light and time and days and nights. It’s ordinary life. Forms accept their need of changing, smoothing their edges, almost trespassing into the body of the next form.The painting becomes a place of encounters: each bar waiting for the meeting with another, close, bar. Stripes rather than bars? No, for they are rigid, making obstruction. The closest bar is an alien presence. Not a mirror, she is opaque. Next to another bar the first who walked in is finally allowed to know how she can be, what to say or not, in their visual conversation. They pull triangular tongues and lick each other.

Not subject to change . . .

Day’s invisible beginner,

The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

Lay on the roof

And made much within her.

The story takes shape as it happened since the beginning. The landscape is done, although Adam and Eve didn’t know how to call it, how to name each other. Fire and water and air over the ground were also unnamed. But the biggest surprise was Eve generating strange creatures unable to stand by themselves. Eyes weren’t big enough to contain the infinite surprises of the new world. Painted forms over thousand years became enormous eyes absorbing the measured, the artificial dress of the earth. And the lord of love and of sooth sorrow made within Karen Carson the artist, as he did ever since within so many artists, the most recent miracle: a magnificent construction, for no use nor abuse. It is called art, if someone still remembers what it means.

Wallace StevensSONG OF FIXED ACCORD

Rou-cou spoke the dove,

Like the sooth lord of sorrow,

Of sooth love and sorrow,

And a hail-bow, hail-bow,

To this morrow.

She lay upon the roof,

A little wet of wing and woe,

And she rou-ed there,

Softly she piped among the suns

And their ordinary glare,

The sun of five, the sun of six,

Their ordinariness,

And the ordinariness of seven,

Which she accepted,

Like a fixed heaven,

Not subject to change . . .

Day’s invisible beginner,

The lord of love and of sooth sorrow,

Lay on the roof

And made much within her.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, New York, 1990

Originally published: Knopf, New York, 1954

In the last paragraph indirect, undeniable reference to The Diaries of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain.